Wednesday, November 25, 2009

1904 Stevens-Duryea revealed

Greetings -

Willy and I uncrated the Stevens this afternoon. As anticipated, it was a couple hours and a whopping big mess to remove the foam. We anticipated some foam blocking and cushioning, what we received was a completely encapsulated vehicle! Which was a good thing, really, because it was a long trip up for a very old original car. So this picture doesn't look too bad until you see the scale of it....

Yes, that's a 7' wide x 7' high x 14' long block of solid foam with a tiny car in the middle of it. But what a car it is.

Thankfully there were some 'strings' built into the packaging which allowed us to take some bigger chunks off, but that was by far the biggest block of foam I've ever seen.

The vehicle was secured and packaged by RedStar Auto in Rhode Island and Sean did a terrific job of blocking and securing the vehicle to the crate - as well as two layers of plastic, a vehicle colver, and pading. Now that I think about it, it took Willy and I almost three hours to uncover the vehicle and it's still mounted to the blocks....

The only unfortunate part of this transport was that the leather fenders had been taken off and put in a separate box which was loaded into the crate. They had been subject to some weather along the way and we are working diligently to reshape them. But here it is, without fenders. The front compartment opens for additional seating which was no doubt a breathtaking proposition for it's day - considering no seatbelts and barely a handhold on the side. More pics to follow after the long weekend.

2 comments:

So glad to see the Hay and SD arrived safe. I was both excited and sad them go. I hope to visit them in the future. Thank you so much I am truly grateful that I have had the pleasure of working with you and you're team.. Sean Brayton Red Star Auto